Being prepared resides alongside the unknown. I believe in both. Rehearse your every note & word & even movement if you can. Dedicate yourself to the vision. Then let go into the living event in which the worst that can happen is not approaching that moment, allowing it to pass away from fear. Even if the anxiety is understandable, for me, regret is worse. I don’t want to know I said no to making art and allowing it to converse, to resonate, in the world.

Poetry derived from research, whether into scientific principles (Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers), pop culture referents (Kimmy Beach’s The Last Temptation of Bond) or mythological/historical figures (Susan McCaslin’s Demeter Goes Skydiving/Kate Braid’s books on Glenn Gould or Emily Carr) is a fairly common mode of composition in Canadian poetry. When it works, it introduces the reader to unexplored realms, submerging them in the very “matter-ing” of the author’s obsessive pursuits. When it doesn’t, research-based poetry sinks into an even more private, solipsistic context the reader is not truly invited to enter as the material fails to be effectively conveyed, and even transcended, through form, aural richness or detail. This trio of gorgeously designed collections from Anvil Press present us with both the beckonings and the turned backs of the poem as research site. & P.S. I plan on getting to the marrow (to my mind of course) of each of these books quick n dirty today!

1/Mari-Lou Rowley’s Unus Mundus:

What Shines: Rowley is a consistently inventive poet, drawing on her background in science writing and the strongest poems in this latest collection evidence this active engagement with lexicons, history and form. She burns from her anaphoric invocation, “Prologue…In the Beginning” where each line begins with “Before” through her “Space/Time Dialogues” between such unlikely conversants as Digges & TuPac and to the end of the “CosmoSonnets” sequence (my favorite section) with its yummy geek words like quinzhee & bogongs and lines like “particle energy measured in electron volts,/the untidy oblate geometry of love” which beautifully fuses theory and emotion. The “Feral Verses” that close the book are also aurally scrumptious and brilliant in their entanglings of literature, ecology and apocalypse: “gardens of promise/goblets of toxin” or “bottle of obsolete cream/a dream of beauty.”

What Stumbles: When Rowley descends to earth, not eco-earth but human-planet, the poems can get a little silly as with “Cicero in the Back Seat,” “Boys on Bicycles” and the flarf piece, “Garden Variety Porn.” Nothing wrong with goofy but I didn’t want it after the singingly intellectual entrances of other sections. I enjoyed the Animalus pieces that thread Latin nomenclature through vivid observation but at times I felt their forms could have been tighter, more honed. Regardless, Unus Mundus is vital as the product of delving and lengthy research, not a flippant dipping.

What Shines: “Real Boys” Harper’s pieces that draw on the ineffable sexuality of Pinnochio and his relentless melancholy in relation to his incapacity to become the flesh-child he thinks Gepetto desires. Especially poems like “Plans” and “Where it goes” tremble with poignancy, evoking the untransferable, nearly untranslatable nature of wood to human, immortal to mutable: “Last night Father told me he wishes to be burned to ash…/I dreamt of the box burning up around me. I wouldn’t catch.” I wanted more of these poems though. “Liner Notes,” the subsequent section that melds an elaboration of the song “Crimson & Clover” with a narrative of a young love-torqued caregiver and her disabled charge was also moving. But Harper is at her most potent when she works in form like the sonnet, “Fever,” the sestina, “Ring in the Grain” and the couplet poem about a miscarriage, “The Loss.” Even when I found the subject matter lacking as in the Sally Draper poems, when she plays with rhyme in the piece “Upwardly Mobile” for instance, where the character becomes “a secondary character in [her] own life. A wife…bringing coffee to men, again and again” the poems rise above content into melody.

What Stumbles: She is trying to do too much in this book, particularly weakening in the sequence about Houdini and his wife Bess. Yes similar preoccupations with relationship, fatherhood, fertility and loss are present but Harper didn’t give herself enough space to truly take the reader into her fascination with the escape artist’s spouse. And sometimes the concept, as in the section, “Papa Hotel” where she imagines her father as actors from Jack Nicholson to Peter Falk, is more interesting than the poems, which here, fall frequently into flattened prosiness, like the lines, “But/inside it feels nice, the air is thick and warm, and there’s only enough room/for the two of us.” I wanted more Pinocchio! 🙂

What it Echoes: If Harper had sustained the Pinocchio sequence into a book-length sojourn (as I had perhaps anticipated too much with the title Wood) then it would recollect The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Sharon McCartney or Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie or maybe Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid. There is so much going on in this book I can’t really sum it up with many other applicable allusions.

3/Marita Dachsel’s Glossolalia:

What Shines: The fact that Dachsel created a whole text from her absorption in the lives of Joseph Smith’s wives and the historical complexities of polygamy. Taking that kind of risk I think is important, even if a wholly successful result is usually elusive. The shifting texture of language between the insertions of the Doctrine and Covenants with their Biblical imperatives and lexicon of “abide and cleave” is potent set alongside the looser, more realistically truthful rhythmic patter of many of the wives such as Hannah Ellis with her drone of “I live a boring life in a boring house/with my boring boring.” Just the names of these wives are poetry. I mean Delcena Diadamia! Naming them and giving them voice is a vital task, particularly bold in pieces like “Maria & Sarah Lawrence” where the two sisters married to Smith provide counterpoint versions of their wedded experience: “I’m the one/who will/who won’t/be remembered.” I also liked Rhoda Richard’s monologue that centers on the metaphor of the nest. And these euphonic lines: “loss, a lure, caught/shredding what they once knew true.”

What Stumbles: While many of Harper’s poems might have made for stronger stories, Dachsel’s poems add up to a play along the lines of Top Girls by Caryl Churchill or Les Belles-Soeurs by Michel Tremblay. Their endings often peter out so a poem that is sharp at the start such as Nancy Maria Winchester: “I didn’t know how to mourn,” becomes lacklustre by the finish: “the man I married, the woman/I hoped to become.” If they were part of a dramatic production then viewer could weave the weaknesses into a more powerful vision perhaps than this reader is capable of doing with her hunger for more perfectly witnessed-to lyrics. Also, the erasure poem, Lucy Walker, was a terrific idea but the found words don’t add up to anything especially compelling: “remain/follow/change/change/receive/comfort/return/calm” (Part One). And at times, when the women descend into contemporary lingo like “God, just the thought of eggs make me want to hurl,” the poems become too eager for accessibility. Yet, as noted, Dachsel has taken on a task easy to falter at, something I definitely discovered in the process of writing my book on the life of the pioneer photographer, Mattie Gunterman (Seeing Lessons, 2010), and has risen to the imagination’s quest for entrance at a depth into the psyches of invisibilized others.

What it Echoes: Apart from the noted allusions, how about Hildegard von Bingen, BIg Love (HBO show), Paint your Wagon (1969 film), The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago (art installation, 1979) and a straw pie cut into infinitesimal slices.

Many writers are growing weary of literary prize culture in Canada from “outsiders” such as Mark McCawley to “insiders” like former Vancouver poet laureate Brad Cran. Prizes are often awarded to poets on the basis of political considerations, demographics or compromise tactics rather than the work itself it seems. And while many still desire prizes as they provide a source of income, purport to open doors (or, without doubt, direct a few more ears towards one’s work,) and proffer a certain cachet, they remain suspicious forms of acclamation. When it comes to an award like the GG, the shortlist always appears more interesting than who wins. Often the final five texts are a diverse offering while the one selected as the “winner” is usually not my personal pick, most commonly because I sense the work was chosen not for its literary value but because it fit some other category of concern that year. Unfortunately, for the most part, I feel this is the case with the book under consideration, the 2013 recipient of the Governor General’s Award.

What Shines: The cover is gorgeous. Almost encaustic in texture, the title and author’s name are set in script above and below the central painting of a basilica, car, and discarded shoe. The poems are consistently spare in their presentation so a haunting feeling of lack accumulates throughout the lyrics, namely, the lack of work, education, support systems and love in the Winnipeg characters Vermette sketches. Although I was drawn to the first three pieces in “Selkirk Avenue” in which a “girl” walking, standing and driving is echoed by the signifiers of thrush, robin and hummingbird, I don’t think the author’s depiction of these inhabitants with their “big gulps” “chips” “beers” “cigarettes” and pared down, despairing movements really gouges the reader emotionally until the second to last section of the book recounting her brother’s disappearance and drowning. “ghosts” and “green disease” stand out here though for their more resonant detail, their “damp shadows” and the “blond circle” a tree’s ring is after it has been slashed down. In the more cutting sequence of elegies, “November,” the pieces, “picture” “lost” and “indians” evoke the matter of fact, blunt awfulness of a racism that dismisses a dead 19 year old boy as just another indian who “goes missing everyday” and that posts the newspaper headline “Native Man Missing After Binge.” In terms of formal experimentation, “mixed tape” is the only really inventive piece in the book in how it takes titles from 80s metal songs and uses them to introduce fragments of his absence such as: “Don’t Know What You Got” whose poem is: “the cold/wet/quiet/when/everyone else/leaves.” The haiku-like intensity works powerfully here to convey the emptiness than enters when someone you love disappears.

What Stumbles: The whole book is written in lower-case apart from two titles, both men’s names. This technique dates the book, making it feel stale, like it is stuck in an 80s prairie vernacular. And perhaps it is or should be. The brother did after all go missing and die in the 80s so possibly the aim is to maintain that decade in both allusions and style. But I found the poetry absent more often than not, the poet’s ear lax and the poems rife with cliches like “never looks back,” tree tops “dancing,” “resplendent like a jewel,” “branches interlaced like fingers,” trees as “skeletons,” houses sighing “like old ladies,” “whipping in the wind,” “caked with mud,” “stifled sobs.” I could go on. This is tired writing. Or this is first book composition from a poet who hasn’t read enough to know better. Then there’s words used out of emotive context like when posters are described as being tossed around the city like “confetti.” Is confetti ever not celebratory? A modifier like “tragic” could have rectified this gap. I really wanted to love her elegies as I adore this form/genre, but I too often felt they descended into the sentimental, such as when her final piece for her brother closes with him envisaged as just another lost little boy “trying to get home.” And the end sequence of voices of the “nortend” (I WAS compelled by that aural recurrence) might have been lengthier and composed in such a way that the effect is not a mere listing of a range of “types” of mostly damaged residents. I couldn’t help but think this book won out over say Russell Thornton’s masterful lyrics because of political considerations. And poetry, as an art form, not a mode of condoned subject matter delivery, doesn’t need that kind of pity, really.

What it Echoes: Joanne Arnott, Marilyn Dumont, Lucille Clifton, Anne Szumigalski, John Hughes films like Pretty in Pink (1986), a boom box piping xylophone tunes, Giacometti’s The Cage (1950), a trip to 7-11 in the dead of night.

To begin. The same week I read this book I also read some editorials directly connected to the material & political engagements of Rhodes’ text, X (Nightwood Editions, 2013). From a letter (unpublished) to the editor of the Sioux Lookout Bulletin by my brother, lawyer, Simon Owen, regarding his abiding concern with the way the First Nations peoples in his town are treated by the courts: “It is not my place to share individual stories, but perhaps my experience as a lawyer can help shed some light on the fundamental challenge facing an institution that includes the word ‘Justice’ in its title. It is a concept that, for me, implies fairness, equality, and inclusiveness of the many variables and perspectives that embody and inform the facts and law of any conflict. Meeting the challenge of justice, for all of us who enter through the doors of a criminal court, requires deep resources of time, attentiveness to different voices, and the cultivation of dignities that may lie buried beneath the shock of trauma or the slow throb of suffering.”

What struck me among many things when reading Simon’s letters was the emphasis on how words mean, should mean, don’t mean along with the need for multiplicity when dealing with complex issues instead of a narrow, rigid, limited modus that refuses to take individual narratives into account. This ethics of diverse approach also compelled me in Rhodes’ collection X.

What Shines: The project itself. In a recent interview with Lemon Hound on Beauty, Rhodes notes he wants, in X, to “focus on the ugliness of language” in relation to treaties signed between the 1870s and the 1920s, to “highlight some of the treaty document’s strategic grammar and word choices – compositional tricks that try to put the mind to sleep,” and to address “issues like colonization, anti-indigenousness, and racism – [where] there isn’t much beauty…but there is a whole lot of ugliness.” The antithesis of putting the mind to sleep, Rhodes’ range of lexical manipulations serve as experiments to oppose devastation, shaking ups of what we have become inured to so that we can, essentially, re-enter sites of amnesia and re-collect inscriptions that initiated suffering. As much as I adore beauty and aesthetically “perfect” poems, such an approach would not be appropriate for Rhodes’ ambition: to awaken his readers to the ways language has been abused to use and thus to make it, to re-phrase William Carlos Williams, “easier to get the news from poems” by instigating a range of ways to not just remember the origins of colonization in Canada but to absorb it once again at a more rupturing level.

Visually, the sharply-designed book offers a darkly pleasing engagement with artifact, silhouette, and typography. Scarred with facts and constantly undulating with shifting forms, X offers the variousness that stems from a necessary ache to communicate, starting with the seemingly divisive subtitle: Poems & Anti-poems, suggesting that the pieces can be read either way or both at once as a counter to the muteness of the singular alphabetical signature-replacement. As one line goes: “It was a silence I could not speak until I had mastered the language of silence.” I loved the section Preoccupied Space, with its visual river flowing with immigration stories, “fonts of power” which foregrounds our mind’s malleability as the relationship to knowledge alters based on the simplest of decisions such as which font the text is couched in, the Beckettian “as may have been grunted” with its empty discourse, the humour of the copulating beavers dialoguing in “Pro Pelle,” “Check against delivery” which strings text from the Harper government’s pseudo-apology into a halting poem, and the last vital compilation, White Noise, “material harvested from 15 283 public comments posted in response to fifty-five online news articles” on the Idle No More protest, a piece both shocking and moving in similar fashion to Rhodes’ AIDS patient sequence in Err. Data reconfigured to offer different doors into what must be felt and the horror and the banality of its instantiations, its delivery. Words as infected blankets.

What Stumbles: For me, when Rhodes becomes too visually tricky, as with “mining, lumbering, trading” or “circle the wagons: in ink” I find the information difficult to connect to, perhaps because the book itself must be turned & twisted to read the words. This is likely another required discombobulation of Rhodes’ project but it felt overly fussy and presented this reader with too many barricades for approach. Similarly, the black box listing generating stations partially overlaying the text in “groundless” or the randomly capped letters of “where there is oil” are examples where the experiment overpowered the emotional attention required for the content. As he offers many approaches to the material, some may obviously work better for certain readers than others.

What it Echoes: Poetically, Sachiko Murakami, Steve Collis, Roger Farr, Greg Scofield, Christian Bok. I don’t think I want to compare this book to art, movies or food today 🙂